Xombie: A Butterfly Among Bees
by Keyrie Youngblood
Summary: Here lies a fan fiction devoted to the flash series Xombie on the web. I could not find another category in which to post it, so it will appear here. Enjoy!
1. The Variant

_Note to reader: _

Since I did not get a chance to give this information in the description, I shall do it here. The actual flash series "Xombie" can be found at www. xombified. com. The creator and his team of geniuses are midway through an effort to make Xombie into a full-length feature film, with better animation, better dialogue, better action scenes, and all around better zombie goodness. But that does not mean the flash chapters are not worth watching. They are also available for viewage on www. newgrounds. com. I encourage all those who like flash, zombies, car chases, or all of the above to visit either one of these websites, especially xombified. com and tell the creator James Farr how much you enjoyed his work and put in a good word for Xombie to the head honchos of ff. net so that maybe Xombie can have its own subcategory!

_Disclaimer: All characters except Crescendo and settings are © James Farr. Don't sue me._

She raised her pretty head and scented the air. Nothing, except for the gravelly smell of the dead ground, decayed buildings and abandonment. She sighed, noting the growing heaviness of the foul air as she sucked it into her lungs. Rain was coming. She glanced up at the sky. Same as it always was, dull grey and purple, the color of an old bruise on the skin of a dead man. And she, of all people, knew what that looked like. Seven years working as a police detective in Chicago had taught her that.

Move on, that's what she had to do. Regret and hunger slowed her steps as she marched down the eerily quiet beach. It was as if the ocean shared her despondency and her weakness and had given up trying to turn the tides. Waves lapped weakly at the sand, and the old carcass of a dead seabird languished in the surf as its feathers were bathed again and again by the unheeding back-and-forth of the salt water. She padded on, the bird's remains her only companion so far.

She closed her eyes, not so much to shut out the emptiness all around her, but to take it in as much as she could. It was something she had learned over the years, over all the years she spent wandering from oasis to oasis in the dark, cold desert of the world. She gave the semi-conscious command, and behind her eyes, her mind suddenly leapt out of her and spread out over the land like a blanket of sentiency with her at its center. She saw the shore and the land beyond stretch out around her and she swept her head across the panorama, wishing, hoping for something, anything. But all was quiet. There was nothing here. No warmth, no light, no sign of anything alive, not even the tiny heartbeat of an insect or a squirrel.

Nothing alive.

Bitterness overwhelmed her, and she clamped down tight the lid of her mind. Her pale eyes blinked open and once again were met with the same hopeless beach, the lifeless waves and the apocalyptic quiet, but all of it had been dipped in shadow like a bright red apple dipped in caramel, dripping with twilight. Night this soon? How long had she been out of it?

The disgruntled growl of the sky behind her told her rain was soon to come. Best to find shelter before she got drenched. Nothing like being rained on to make your mood even worse.

She bore left and trotted inland, looking for the remains of a building under which to huddle or an abandoned vehicle in which to sleep for the night. That was one good thing about the way things were. Now that the sun barely shone, she could be out during the day and sleep at night. That was the way she always liked it.

She kept her senses heightened and her ears and eyes opened as she moved. Even though she couldn't find any people, there were other things, far less desirable, that might happen to cross her path.

_Speaking of less desirable, _she groaned inwardly as she breasted a small hill and a graveyard hove into view directly in front of her. The stink of the dead smacked her square in the face. Crinkling her nose, she did another mental sweep, this time searching not for the living, but for the dead. Their smell was all around, but not a single corpse popped up on her radar. Had they all been dug up? Or... had they dug _themselves_ up?

The cautious, logical part of her mind upon which she had depended in her work warned her, loudly, to turn away and continue her search for shelter. But the newer, bolder voice in her mind smiled and said _hey, curiosity can't kill _this_ cat._

"True," she whispered, her voice thin and airless. "If there _are_ zombies here, and they've all left, p'raps they've all gone to look for humans to eat."

The voice smiled, nodded, and promptly finished her thought for her. _where there are zombies, there are humans. where there are humans, there is food._

Her mouth began to water, and she strode with renewed resolve under the wrought iron arch into the graveyard, bathed in shadow. Sure enough, as she squatted down on her haunches to inspect a newly-opened gravesite, it had been dug out from the inside. The hole was ragged and uneven and the sides were rough-hewn, not cut smooth with the blade of a shovel. There were no piles of dirt around the site and the hole itself was small, just the right size for a person to surface as if he were coming up from a dive in water. Her detective's shrewd eyes roved over the ground, the brows above them knitted together in concentration. Her head cocked slightly to the side when she found a series of marks which nothing in her experience had taught her to recognize, but she knew them right away: a set of five shallow furrows in the loose dirt, made by scraping fingers, digging and clawing their way out of the ground. Five more near them, and another five. They scarred the ground in one place, and, as she crept outward from the grave on all fours, she found a lone set of footprints, left by bare feet, walking unsteadily but quickly down the hill away from the beach.

_they were definitely after something,_ the voice, hushed by awe, mumbled in her. Dozens of other graves laid open, like gaping punctures in the earth, bleeding dirt and worms. All the footprints that her scanning eyes could find led in one direction. _that's the way to go,_ the voice said resolutely. She quickened her pace, picking herself up onto two legs as she went, guided by the fierce growling in her gut and the sour, swampy stink of the zombies in her hypersensitive nostrils.

Well, at least the rain had passed on.

She had followed the zombies' path for the better part of three hours, and all she had turned up were a dead end and a dead hearse. _can someone turn down the irony? it's hurting my eyes, _the voice spat sarcastically.

The zombies were nowhere to be seen, but their stink saturated the air and the upholstery of the vehicle, its windows broken and its hood all but torn off. She sulked around the car, seeing all the signs of its recent operation, but the people who had driven it had long gone, leaving nothing, not even sweaty palmprints on the steering wheel or stray hairs on the seat. It was as if whoever had driven the hearse had disappeared as completely as the evaporating heat from the mangled engine. The zombies' smell was still all around, and the overpowering reek confounded her senses and made her head swim. Thankful that her stomach was empty, she ambled away from the hearse, swallowing hard.

The zombies could not have gotten to the people driving the hearse first. She would have seen blood and signs of a struggle. They had to have escaped, but there were no signs of that either. Whoever they were, they were swift and silent as ghosts, as detectable as a vampire's reflection in a mirror.

Suddenly, the familiar but nauseating stench of decaying flesh invaded her nostrils with renewed strength. She froze, for accompanying the smell was the raspy, laborious sound of heavy breathing and pounding footsteps.

But it was not just one, her preternatural ears told her. The being, the zombie, that was trying to creep up on her had a companion, a much quieter one, but one that gave off a strange, wild smell.

Weak with hunger though she was, she knew that dispatching two walking dead would not drain her that quickly. She turned, slowly, flexing her stiff, aching muscles and gathering what power she had deeper into herself, readying for the battle.

She faced a man, a zombie, drawn up to his– its full height, easily a foot and a half taller than she. The flesh of his– its face had long since dripped away, leaving only wide, wild eyes set bulbously in an angular, skull face. But as her own pale green eyes traveled down his– its hunched bulk, they widened in surprise. This zombie had muscles. This zombie was _ripped._ He– it looked like instead of wandering along the side of the road moaning, it did several hundred reps every morning before breakfast. Under its grey-blue decaying flesh, powerful cords of muscle and sinew bunched and coiled, moved like vipers, curled and ready to strike. Biceps, deltoids, pectorals, abdominals, quadriceps and hamstrings all screamed at her, bulging, barely contained by the zombie's thin skin and torn remnants of cargo pants held together with a belt and a prayer. They moved, they flexed, they seemed... alive. This was not right.

Her eyes traveled back up to his– why did she keep referring to it as a _him_? It was dead, a sexless, inhuman pile of reanimated flesh... but... it kept staring at her. Silent and unmoving, its haunting eyes drew her own toward them. His eyelids long since eaten away, his eyes now gaped at her demonically, focusing all their power on her. For the first time in many, many years, she felt the cold, wet eel of fear slither up her spine.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

_did it just..._

Talk...

_to me?_

As if this wasn't enough to set her completely out of her frame, the zombie's quieter but more savage companion suddenly made its presence known. Out from behind the zombie's massive tree trunk legs stepped a snarling, slathering dog, an _undead_ dog. Huge and hulking as its human counterpart, the dog stood even with her waist at its shoulder, as full of muscle as its companion, and, judging from the strings of rabid foam drizzling from its black jaws, twice as mean.

"Hey, I asked you a question. What are you doing here?" The human zombie spoke again, in a deep baritone that was as dull and grating as the dirt that had probably been his– its home for decades, at least.

Her mind worked double overtime, flitting through options and situations, all of them unfavorable, the most desirable of which ended with her getting away missing only a leg

and some chunks of flesh. She breathed deep, swallowed her fear as best she could, and drew herself up to her own full height, relying only on the smooth, sensual charm she had inherited from her father and her maker.

"What I'm doing here hardly has bearing in this conversation, my hulking friend," she said, hoping her voice did not betray the cold nervousness that was making her entire body thrum. "The real question is how a lonely, harmless traveler like _moi_ can get past you and Fluffy there without losing a limb and half her hide?"

The zombie chuckled humorlessly, a dry sound like rocks tumbling in a dryer. "I know harmless when I see it, and I haven't seen anything harmless yet." The zombie reached a meaty hand up behind his shoulder and pulled a long-handled shovel out from a holder on his back. The spade gleamed silver in the weak light, viciously sharp despite layers of caked dirt and

_gore_

on its surface. With a small chink, he brought it down, point first, into the ground and leaned heavily on its friction-taped handle, making it clear just who had the upper hand.

She suddenly became conscious of her entire self, her pale, almost blue-tinted skin, her white-green eyes, her long fingernails, and her hair, honey blonde save for a shock of moon-white at the top of her high widow's peak. Her appearance didn't quite scream 'normal harmless human traveler'. At least he hadn't noticed...

"I really wouldn't prefer for this to come to fisticuffs, now," she put her hands up in a conciliatory 'I've got nothing to hide' display, painfully aware of how her long, spidery fingers were trembling. "All I want is to be on my way. I'm unarmed, as you can see," she opened her arms wide, "and I'm not exactly in the best shape of my life, so I would not even dream of giving you and Fluffy a hard time."

The zombie seemed slightly appeased, though she wasn't sure if it was because of her words or her trembling frame, shaking half from fear and half from hunger. He heaved a grating sigh and straightened up, relaxing his iron grip on the shovel, which she thought with amusement totally out of place, could not have suited him better if he had planned it that way. "It won't come to fisticuffs, and I can guarantee you that. It would come to Cerberus and me gutting you like a trout."

"Oh, certainly, yes. I just said 'fisticuffs' as a slightly... you know... tamer way of putting it." _now you're rambling,_ both voices in her head warned her. "Right. Before I scamper on my way, would you happen to know where I could find the nearest human settlement? I've been wandering for a while, and I'm getting a bit peckish, if you can understand."

Before the zombie had a chance to reply, a movement behind him caught her eye. A small being, a little girl, poked her head around the zombie's knees and gazed up at her with large, liquid eyes.

She swallowed nothing, her throat suddenly feeling coated with sandpaper. She licked cracked lips with a parched tongue as she locked eyes with the little child, the little child with a beating heart.

She felt it, she heard it, within every corner of her, the child's heartbeat rushing through every nerve in her body. Suddenly, she was alive, alive with hunger, burning like a dragon's breath, shooting and curling through her body, lighting up her eyes with cold, mindless fire. She could not stop it, could not stop the rush of animal craving, the desire above all else to sink her teeth into this child's soft, warm, living flesh.

It had been so long since she had fed. It seemed an eternity since she had last tasted that delicious nectar that now flowed so abundantly and so sweetly, just mere feet out of her grasp. Her heart began to race, beating out its own dry tattoo, as her breath came raggedly in her burning throat. Her jaw dropped slack, and her teeth grew long and cruelly pointed, almost with a craving of their own to be buried in the smooth, pink skin of the little girl's neck. On the edges of her consciousness, she heard the little girl speak to her.

"We're looking for a human settlement too. We're trying to find my family. You can come with us if you want to."

She couldn't have replied if the zombie had held a silver stake to her heart.

But he did not have a silver stake. What he did have he spun deftly in one hand and pointed it at her, squared his massive shoulders and crouched in a ready stance, coiled like a spring, ready to pounce on her. "I dare you to see how far you can get," the zombie growled savagely, gently nudging the girl back behind his hulking body.

_he's found you out now_, the voice said, trembling and frightened, and yanked her, slobbering and spitting, back from the edges of madness into regretful composure. She swallowed again, this time her throat was coated with thick, foul-tasting saliva, the last reserves of moisture left in her own dead body. She filled her lungs to capacity several times, each lungful of cold, stagnant air helping to bring her, grudgingly, back into the now.

"All right, you got me," she said, taking a step backward for good measure, as she eyed the two undead creatures, growling and spitting for all they were worth, trying to protect the little human girl, the girl that could have been, no, _should _have been, her first meal in weeks...

_stop thinking about that and find a way out of this before you get hacked to bits by Mister Zombified and Rabid Rover..._

"I relent," she cooed, and bowed low in submission, a gesture which both the zombie and the dog seemed to understand, but they both remained crouched and ready, knowing that they were all that stood between their little girl and the very teeth of the devil himself. "But in all honesty, methinks it would be in all three of your best interests if you were to relax a tad and listen to what I have to say."

Slowly but surely, her otherworldly charm was returning, giving her strength, calming the fire in her veins and the trembling in her voice. The mere presence of the girl, and the meal that she implied, gave her the illusion of returning strength, and the very real notion of leverage with which to bargain with the zombie.

"It seems to me we are all looking for the same thing: a human city. You're looking for this little girl's parents, and I am looking for a much-needed morsel of sustenance. In that light, our chance meeting seems quite fortuitous. Judging by that map in your pocket, sir," she inclined her head toward the zombie's right hip, where a hastily-folded piece of paper made its home, "you know where this proverbial pot of gold lies at the end of all of our rainbows. And, weak though I am, I do pack quite a punch when provoked, so I could provide an extra measure of protection, if it is needed." She even had the boldness to tip a smile into one corner of her mouth, barely parting her thin, grey lips to expose the pearly white point beneath.

"No, it is not needed," stated the zombie flatly. "We've got that department covered, as a matter of fact. What we don't need is something else to protect her _from_." The zombie's wide, white eyes locked accusingly on her.

But her smile only widened. "Indeed," she said, her voice like oil over ice. "I concur. Which is why I think you might want to reconsider letting me tag along. If you don't agree to let me join your little traveling circus, not only will you have your usual host of several score bloodthirsty zombies hunting you, but one irritated and very very hungry vampire on your tail. However, if I do get a ticket in, the old adage will once again prove true: 'The closer you are to danger, the further you are from harm.' In addition, I will lend whatever skills that remain with me to the cause of bringing this little girl safely to a human city and back into the loving arms of her parents, which, I will vow right here and now, not to eat."

Her ultimatum dropped, she waited nervously for the zombie to squeeze it all through the creaky laundry press of his mind. He sat motionless, his shovel still gripped in one dirty, decaying hand itching to hurl it at her.

The girl, peeking out from behind the zombie's legs again, switched her deer-eyed gaze from the zombie to her, looking tired, hungry, but remarkably tranquil. The unending drumbeat of her tiny heart stayed calm and slow, which surprised her, the vampire. Usually by now she could all but dance to the frantic beat of her victims' hearts. The girl most likely had seen her share of danger, and merely another breed of undead did not faze her. The vampire could not help but smile. She did not normally grow to like her food, but this girl might be the exception.

"I don't trust you as far as I could throw you," the zombie's croaking voice broke into her thoughts. She blinked and refocused her eyes on the little girl, calling back a bit of the old hunger into them for the zombie to see.

"I don't blame you," she nodded sagely, "but do keep in mind I'm twice as hard to kill as your less sentient brethren and half as patient." She added a sibilant note to her voice, entwining her words like a snake swiftly squeezing the life out of its victim. Her cold lip snapped up almost imperceptibly, and the zombie was visibly set aback. "If it makes you feel any better, you won't have to worry about me turning into a bat or any of that nonsense," she scoffed. "I'm just as stuck in my body as you are in yours, my friend."

Slowly and creakily, the zombie rose from his hunched pose onto two straight, tall legs. The dog raised its head as well, its pointed lupine ears sliding backward, away from their threatening front-pointed position. "Very well, then. Our choices are limited, as always."

She could have leapt for joy. Instead, she allowed a happy grin to split her flawless, cold face in two. "Indeed," she said. "But, given your choices, methinks you made the wise one." She stepped forward cautiously and held her hand out to the zombie. He did not take it, instead, glared at it coldly, and then raised his eyes to hers, distrust and contempt boiling in them like poison. Before she could blink, the zombie spun his shovel around with inhuman swiftness, its vicious point glinting inches from her pale throat.

"Methinks _you'd_ be wise to never do so much as _glance_ her way," the zombie warned, jabbing his head back at the little girl. "As long as you're with us, you go with your mouth and your hands tied. _Tightly_."

Her jaw dropped. "Hey now, I'm not your prisoner!"

"It's either that or I staple you to the wall and leave you there."

She swallowed hard. His low, dangerous voice and his eyes assured her he was as grave as the ground from which he had escaped.

"It seems I'm not the only one with limited options," he growled, and she felt sure he would have smiled if he could.

A resigned sigh blew out of the corner of her mouth. "All right, a deal's a deal." She stood still and quiet as the zombie sheathed his shovel, plodded toward her and ripped a long strip off the hem of his pants, twisting it into a makeshift rope in his hands.

"Turn around."

She obeyed, and felt her hands being crossed at the wrists and the cloth being wound around them. She gritted her teeth as the zombie roughly tied her bonds, making them dig painfully into her skin. "Hey, the rope's kinda tight, there, Spanky," she spat.

"That's the point... Spanky." He spat back, clamped a filthy, heavy hand on her shoulder, and spun her around. _Rrrrrrrrip,_ went the thick fabric of his other leg, and she watched the zombie's powerful shoulders flex and bulge as he twisted and spun the strip into more rope until it creaked with protest, then snapped it straight very close to her face. "Open your mouth," the zombie rumbled, his rotting mandible making slight squelching noises as it rubbed against the fleshy joint of his skull.

The vampire blinked. "No way am I going to let you put that in _my _mouth. Who knows how long it's been since you washed— "

The zombie's thick arms shot out, thrusting the rope between her milky-white fangs and over her tongue, choking her. But he did not give her a chance to gag; she felt the rope jerked tight at the back of her head and knotted. She doubled over, coughing and gagging, the rough-hewn fabric cutting the corners of her mouth.

The zombie stepped back and admired his handiwork. "Much better." A raspy chuckle echoed from his dead throat.

She shot him a venomous glare that could have melted cast iron and bared her fangs, her mouth forced half open. As if in an afterthought, the zombie brought his knee up and ripped a third, wider strip off his pants leg and twisted the ends between his thumb and forefinger.

"To complete the look..." He stepped behind her and muzzled her with the improvised bandana, denying her even the remotest chance of using her fangs against his young charge.

Righteous anger now tearing full strength through her, she considered briefly kicking her leg up behind her, catching the zombie between his legs, but she thought better of it. Not only would it make him more angry, but what would have hurt probably hadn't been there in years, if not decades. She settled for hissing at him impotently, feeling helpless, at the mercy of a strangely sentient, very powerful zombie.

"All right, then." He backed away from her toward his two companions, and settled huge fists onto muscular hips. "I think we're ready now, what do you think, Cerberus?" He moved his dead-eyed gaze from her to his massive, slobbering dog, who made a thick woofing sound in the depths of its broad chest. "Let's go." He beckoned her with a single decayed finger and moved off, the girl and the dog close on his heels.

Muttering curses around the disgusting thing in her mouth, she followed him, her head down.


	2. Less Sentient Brethren

The zombie held his hand up, a signal to all those behind him to halt. She gazed at his back, stiff and straight as a ramrod, and rolled her eyes.

_oh sure, _now_ he notices._

The malodorous zombie smell had been growing stronger in her nostrils for the past hour, and a quick mental scan of the terrain ahead confirmed what her nose suggested: zombies. Nests and nests of zombies, all of whom could smell the little girl as clearly as the vampire could smell them.

_oh well. serves him right. s' not like i didn't try to warn him._

He pulled his weapon out from the chain crossing his back, everything else about him deathly still, energy coiled in him, humming in his muscles like a million bees.

It was his own fault that he had gagged and muffled her. She had mumbled and gurgled all the warnings she could, but all the zombie had done was come dangerously close to thwacking her head with the blade of his shovel.

"We're being hunted," he said ominously. Creaking his skeleton head around, he stared over his shoulder at the three of them. "Cerberus, guard the girl. You, up front with me," he jabbed his shovel back at the vampire. "You'll be where I can see you."

She moved abreast of him obediently, wondering what he had in mind for her. Would he use her as a shield? Or a diversion? She was as dead as he was, so the other zombies would not be interested in her. She wished the zombie had not been so thorough in making sure her fangs stayed in her mouth.

The dog began to growl as the shadows on the periphery of her vision moved, slowly creeping toward them. She did not need to squint into the night to know what they were.

"H-how many are there?" The little girl squeaked, seeming to live her life behind either the zombie's or the dog's powerful bulk.

"Lots," the zombie replied, his voice dropping out of his mouth like a ten-ton weight.

_try several dozen_, the voice droned in her mind, never failing to bring the most hopeless nugget of pessimism to lurid light. She heaved a sigh and did the only thing she could do: closed her eyes and began funneling what was left of her ebbing strength down into her core, where it writhed and teemed in a tight ball, slowly growing and building.

She was only dimly aware of the fight that had erupted outside her body. The zombie had launched himself at the nearest pack of his fellows, flailing his shovel madly. Their bodies fell like wheat before a scythe, spewing rotted organs and foul fluids from severed arms, legs, heads and torsos. The dog had also galloped headlong into another knot of zombies, tearing flesh and rending limbs from bodies.

Carefully she opened her eyes and saw another large pack of walking dead, shuffling toward the girl, who remained motionless on the edge of the fight, frozen by terror.

The moment before her body exploded with the dark power inside it, she opened a sluice gate in her mind and let it blast out of every pore in her cold, dead skin. It hit the zombies like a tidal wave, hurling them back ten feet, killing them without a sound.

Through the gag, she smiled haughtily. Then darkness overwhelmed her.


	3. Starting to Dig

Something wet on her lips that slipped between them like velvet and touched her tongue.

Warmth spreading outward from that drop.

Something stirring in her again.

More on her lips, like droplets of life.

Blood.

Her eyes snapped open and the dark shapes looming in her vision immediately resolved themselves into the shapes of the zombie's face and the body of a dead pigeon, dripping blood.

Blood.

She sat bolt upright, fangs flashing, and tore the bird out of the zombie's grip and shoved it into her mouth, sucking greedily. The blood was sour and already cooling, and there was precious little of it, but it coated her aching throat like ambrosia and sent out waves of warm comfort that banished the dull, constant pain that had begun in her stomach but had spread to every inch of her hollow body.

Her thirst was barely sated when the dead thing clenched in her shaking hands grew cold and ran dry. Denial nearly forced her to hug the carcass to her chest and beg it to give her more. Ruefully she lowered the bird from her mouth and let it roll out of her hands onto the dusty ground, panting lightly.

"Feel better?" She heard the zombie's thick, deep voice in the wake of the last delicious wave of tranquility. She blinked owlishly and saw him perched atop an overturned car, outlined in the light of the sunless dawn as a classic '75 Corvette, flecks of sunset orange paint still clinging stubbornly to its rusted sides. She smiled.

"I remember driving one of those," she said, feeling herself snap back together. All the edges that hunger had dulled became sharp again. It suddenly occurred to her that her hands and mouth had been untied. She gazed at her white hands blankly.

The zombie glanced under him. "Huh. I missed out on that little piece of history."

She swallowed. "Thanks for the drink."

The zombie shrugged. "It was her idea." He jabbed a thumb at the little girl, curled into a tiny snoring ball against the sleeping dog's side. "I would have just let you die."

"Yeah, I know," she sighed. "But you have to admit, I did help you. I did kill some zombies. With my hands behind my back, no less." She cocked a smile.

The zombie was silent, staring with unfocused eyes at the ground in front of him. Her eyes roved from his skeletal face to the girl and the dog curled up beside the car. She smiled again just to see the tiny, innocent little girl snuggled peacefully into the mangy, filthy fur of the hulking, corrupted undead dog.

"So I got that the dog's name is Cerberus. Very appropriate. What's the girl's and yours? Do you have one, or shall I just continue to call you Spanky?"

"Call me Spanky and you'll be carrying your teeth around with you in a jar," he growled. "The girl's name is Zoe. I'm Dirge."

"Dirge," she repeated, her smile widening. "Now that's original. I thought most zombies were either 'Uuuuuuuuungh' or 'Aaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuu'." She chuckled at herself, wondering briefly whether she had gone too far.

"Well... I'm not 'most zombies.' "

She breathed a quick sigh of relief when his shovel remained safely on his back and not sticking out of hers. "No, you certainly are not."

"What about your name? You have one, or is it just Mrs. Dracula?"

She threw her head back and laughed. "No, no, not Mrs. Dracula. I'm Cress. Short for Crescendo."

"Your parents must have liked music a little too much." Dirge examined a hangnail on his thick grey finger, but never let his eyes off her for long.

"Not my mortal parents, no. They called me Verushka... at least... I think they did. I'm not sure anymore."

Dirge scoffed. "At least you remember your name. The first thing I remember was waking up and feeling worms in between my toes."

Smiling, Cress crossed her legs under her and began picking bits of dirt out of her threadbare tank top. "I've been meaning to ask you about that, now that I'm not bound and gagged."

"Ask me about what? I don't have much to tell."

"Where you came from. I came across some opened graves a few hours back ... but I guess I know what those zombies were after now." She glanced over at Zoe, her childish, unlined face twitching in a dream. "Were you one of them?"

"In that cemetery, yes. One of them, no."

Cress narrowed her eyes. "So... what _are _you?"

Dirge shrugged his massive shoulders. "I don't know what I am. All I know is what I'm not."

"Cryptic enough, if you'll pardon the pun." She flashed a smile, feeling the atmosphere bearing heavier on her with her every failed attempt at bringing a smile to the zombie's stoic face. _you're both dead. when was the last time you saw a dead guy belly-laughing? _The voice of her new self grumbled. Cress sighed and gave up. "Where'd you pick up Zoe? I didn't smell her when I was sniffing around your graveyard."

Dirge visibly prickled, his eyes lighting on Zoe's sleeping form. "I thought I read somewhere that one of vampires' weaknesses was gravedirt."

Cress' patience was wearing thin. "You, of all people, should know not to believe everything you read about the dead." She locked eyes with him. "You evaded my question. Where did you find Zoe?" The last vestiges of dark power were spinning like gossamer threads out of her eyes and connecting them with Dirge's.

"She found me," he said reluctantly, her weak hypnosis barely touching his mind. She blinked, and the cobwebs vanished. The momentary strength the bird's blood had given her was already waning. _time for a change of tack, _she thought grudgingly.

"Dirge, you have my word that I will not harm the girl or her family. I apologize for my actions earlier, but it's quite difficult for me to imagine I'm the only one here who's laid eyes on her and thought 'tasty snack.' "

A low rumble came from the zombie's broad, powerful chest. "The word of a vampire..."

"Is unbreakable. If I could, I'd show you where it is written."

"Vampires come with rulebooks?"

"As a matter of fact, they do, smartass," Cress scowled at Dirge, skepticism glaringly visible in his eyes. "Vampire law was written _way_ before your great-great-great-grandparents even _thought_ about being born. You show me zombie law and I'll gladly hurl myself out in the middle of the desert at midday."

_nice change of tack._

Cress snapped her mouth shut. "Look, just understand... I won't kill Zoe. I can survive on animal blood if I have to."

"Looks like you're going to have to," Dirge said.

"And I suppose you'll keep tying my hands up and gagging me." Cress stretched out on her back and let her eyes wander up to the dismal morning sky. The bruised clouds looked more like a concrete wall than the wispy vapors of nothing they really were.

"Yep."

"How will you learn to trust me if you never give me a chance to show you?" She asked, once again feeling pinned under the zombie's thumb and hating it.

"Who said I _wanted_ to learn to trust you?"

_okay, screw change of tack._

"You know, a hundred years ago– no, even fifty years ago, I would have been walking around with you on a leash." Cress turned over on her side, away from Dirge. "I'm going to sleep while I can."

"You just woke up. Don't tell me vampires need their beauty sleep."

She humored him with a nice, toothy grin. "Keeps us young," she purred.

"Riiiiiiight. Well, before you doze off..." She heard the angry, prolonged croak of the Corvette as Dirge heaved himself off it and approached her. She felt the improvised rope wind painfully around her wrists again, and she felt the detestable gag force its way into her mouth again.

_a deal's a deal._

_Oh, shut up._


	4. City of the Dead

"Zoe! Cress! Time to leave!"

Dirge's bark rent the empty black silence of her sleep and forced her eyes open. The broken bits of sleep fell from her mind like glass shattered by a high note and she groaned.

"Are there zombies?"

Cress heard Zoe's drowsy mumble, but the lullaby thump of her heart kept steady. Dirge had shaken his head no. Cress drug the first breath of the day laboriously into her lungs, and smelled nothing but Dirge, the dog, and the tantalizing aroma emanating from Zoe.

"No zombies close by, but there is a city about five or six miles that way. The chances are slim, but maybe this one has some people left that can help."

Before Cress had time to uncurl and stretch her stiff, wilting muscles, she was hoisted bodily to her feet by Dirge's huge hand, holding her wrists where they were crossed by the rope in a vicegrip. She bit back a squeal of pain and alarm.

"I'm afraid you'll have to catch up on your beauty rest sometime later."

Had she the strength, she would have laid him flat with one solid telekinetic blast to the back of his bald skull head. All she could do was grit her teeth behind the mask and the gag and work her popped shoulders back into place.

If she didn't find something substantial to drink soon, she'd waste away. She hadn't even had a proper rest in weeks, and that had sapped her strength as much as the lack of fresh, living blood. She closed her eyes, flexed her shoulders, and wished bitterly that she had stopped in that graveyard and dug up one of the empty coffins to sleep in. She didn't care how rotten or how smelly it was; all she wanted to do was crawl in, lay down and wrap herself in the blessed wooden cocoon of silence.

_Thock_ went her shoulder and she groaned again, this time bringing a backward glance from Zoe, who was trotting along on Dirge's heels. Cress raised her head and brought her own dim, clouded eyes up to meet Zoe's tired but alert ones. Dark blue circles were set deep into the thin, pale skin around her eyes, painted there by nights spent sleepless, hungry, and alone. The girl gazed at her for a long time, unafraid. Cress was taken aback; even grown men could not meet her hypnotic, piercing eyes for long. The vampire blinked, and Zoe turned away.

_you're weaker than you thought. your eyes don't even work anymore. you need to drink,_ the wheedling voice of her hunger whispered, tugging her mind toward...

"Not her... not her," she mumbled to herself, out of earshot of the zombie and his dog. Through the straggly sheet of her chin-length blonde hair, her eyes settled on the dog padding behind Dirge. The dog, Cerberus, had either seemed to grow a few inches or Cress had shrunk. He had stopped to let Zoe clamber up on his back, and the girl's legs did not even reach past the bottom of the dog's belly. An eerily lupine head sat high and alert on a strong neck, which in turn grew down into a deep chest and massive shoulders. Muscles rippled under his patchy fur all down his back, and Cress did not doubt his powerful back legs would allow him to break even with a racing Thoroughbred, had he the chance. In life he could have been a German Shepherd or he could have been a Malamute. It was hard to tell, because more of him was stitches and bald patches of skin than what used to be his original body. But one thing was unmistakably clear to Cress: he had been a police dog. If aspects of an organism's earthly existence carried over beyond death, then this dog had the bearing and the discipline of half a well-trained, seasoned K9 police unit. Cress herself had worked with and had been partnered with several K9 units on cases over the years, and the only difference between Cerberus and those Shepherds was that the small flame of life was dead in this dog's haunted, watchful eyes.

That spark, on the other hand, was anything but dead in the eyes of the little girl astride Cerberus. From the moment she had set her large oildrop eyes on Cress, the vampire had become intrigued, fascinated with the bold young thing, and not just as a source of nourishment. Zoe herself was small, the top of her head nearly level with Dirge's knee, but the desire to survive beat so powerfully in her heart that it nearly overwhelmed Cress. Her threadbare grey shirt bore the silhouette of a raven, perched vigilant on an invisible branch, watching Cress, it seemed. Another shirt, this one big and flowing, was tied by the sleeves around her waist, and below the shirt Zoe wore long, loose pants that seemed to be, like the rest of her outfit, hand-me-downs from an older brother. Her sneakers were scuffed and torn open in several places, a bleak contrast to Cress' own impregnable steel-toed workman's boots she had stolen from a victim several months ago. Zoe's sable hair was done up in two fraying pigtails, her long, choppy bangs covering the last traces of a healing cut on her cheek. Her soft, timid voice and demeanor belied the deep reservoir of strength and courage Cress saw shining in her, and the vampire began to regret almost killing the girl.

She promptly received a mental slap in the face by the voice: _don't tell me you're _that_ far gone. she's prey. she's fair game._

She shook the voice out of her head, and nearly fell over with dizziness.

_need i try to convince you further?_

"Ah, the city," proclaimed Dirge, and with monumental effort, Cress raised her head. The ragged, wrecked skyline of what was once a mighty metropolis reached plaintively to the sky, broken and bent like the old wooden fence of a haunted house.

"Looks promising," Zoe moaned.

"Come on. Maybe we'll have better luck here." Dirge's voice suddenly lost its rough, croaky edges and took on an almost begging tone as he glanced back at the girl perched on Cerberus' broad back. "Remember we haven't seen any zombies for the past half hour. Maybe they all know to stay away from this place because there are people here who can defend themselves."

"But you're a zombie. If there are people here, they won't know you're good. They'll try to kill you too, and Cerberus, and maybe even..." Zoe glanced back at Cress, "her. Maybe they'll kill all of us."

"We won't know until we try. Come on."

_greeeeeeeeaaaaat. let's follow the dead guy into the jaws of death... again. i'm not sure if this is irony or just plain stupidity._

Cress repeated Dirge's empty reassurance to the voice as the four travelers plodded down the main thoroughfare into the city, its turtlebacked asphalt littered with dead leaves, broken road signs, ancient litter from the city's active past, and the occasional puddle of dirty black liquid that could have been water or blood.

The main huddle of high-rises into which they crept had fared slightly better than the suburbs, which had been so completely decimated by fire, storms, zombies and time that the individual rubble piles of houses were no longer distinguishable from each other or the ground. Rather, it was as if the ruins of the skyscrapers themselves had been built from the scraps of the suburbs, dripping like soggy sand through the hand of a giant to the jagged drip-towers at some dismal beach.

They passed a skyscraper with only its bottom four floors and a single "U" on the front left intact, and then came the stench that almost made Cress topple over again. A dangerous, phlegmy growl sounded from Cerberus, and Dirge had already drawn his shovel.

"Cerberus!" Dirge did not even need to finish the command, and the dog hurtled off like a stitched juggernaut. Squelchings and crunches and savage barks reached Cress' oblivious ears. She stood anchored to the ground, bone-chillingly scared for the first time in her immortal life. She was out of strength, and the bolt of adrenaline that would have been crashing through her system by now had been absent for over two hundred years. She had no weapon, and no power of her own with which to blast the zombies back like last time. She hunkered down near Zoe, seeking a measure of protection, but in the next moment she realized that Zoe was what these zombies were after, and she flung herself away. Dirge stood tall and protected the girl, wielding his shovel as an extension of his right arm, slicing one zombie down the middle of its mangled face, and another clean in half at the ribs. He leapt at the zombies with furious energy and used every inch of his weapon for a kill. The butt of his shovel pierced the stomach of one behind him just as the flat of the blade dealt a sickening blow to the head of another limping dangerously close to the girl.

The sound of blood rushing through her veins reminded the vampire of Niagra Falls as the zombies circled closer to them. She watched Dirge stare out over the sea of dripping flesh midway through a punishing snap kick that made the head of the unlucky zombie explode like a watermelon under a mallet. The tide was coming in, and Dirge was quickly becoming overwhelmed.

Suddenly, he whipped his head around, his wide eyes glittering with battlelust, and locked her eyes onto his. His dead, gravelly voice seemed to squirm into her mind like earthworms into a freshly-buried corpse. _You touch Zoe, you spend the rest of your existence with a lead pipe stuck between your eyes. _

Then, with a deep, mighty bellow of rage and all the coiled energy of a lion pouncing on its kill, the zombie vaulted into the air high above the heads of his kind and landed like a cat upon several of them, his shovel already swinging. Cress realized then what had happened. Now she was alone with Zoe, while Dirge fought back the zombies from a less desperate position. She looked at Zoe, and Zoe looked back at her. The girl was frightened, but not of her. Bound, gagged and weak to the point of collapse, there was not much the vampire could have done to her, as much as she would have wanted. Instead, the girl drew close to her and they huddled together as Dirge and Cerberus mowed through the zombies around them.


End file.
